June 17th, 2009

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (SingTel) is holding negotiations with the Australian government on folding the company’s Optus fixed-line assets into a planned national broadband network in Australia.

Reportedly SingTel wants as much as 30% of the broadband-network company that is being founded by the Australian government. The Optus assets are valued at A$1.7 billion or US$1.4 billion, and the negotiations are expected to be finalized in November.

Optus is SingTel’s subsidiary in Australia, which initially had tsrived to build the broadband network as part of a consortium.

But the government said in April that it would scrap the tender process and instead plans to back the A$43 billion high-speed network with investments from the private sector. The global financial crisis dashed hopes of a single private company completing the project.

The private sector can hold as much as 49% of the new company, though there could be limits on individual holdings.

The comments came after the Australian newspaper reported over the weekend that a possible sale of Optus’s cable assets into the planned network could be the first step toward relisting the company in Australia.

Optus is in a strong position and has a range of options available to it, SingTel said, and the company will not comment on market speculation.

Analysts said a potential sale of SingTel’s Optus fixed-line assets would allow the telecommunications operator to get a foothold into Australia’s broadband program and allow the company to raise funds to help Indian associate Bharti Airtel Ltd. in its bid to merge with South African mobile operator MTN Group Ltd.

Besides, analysts also expect Australia’s dominant phone company, Telstra Corp, to sell parts of its fixed-line network into the national broadband network, although many expect to see a battle between the telecom operator and the government over the network’s pricing.

Buying existing infrastructure will give the planned network a large, immediate footprint, which could help reduce overall construction costs, analysts have said.

Olympus officially launched first MIcro Four Thirds camera called E-P1 ‘digital pen’, cameras those are smaller than their competitors without sacrificing quality or functionality, and if you pay attention the image, it’s amazing, Actually Olympus has engraving on the chrome edge of the top plate since 1959, then famous by the name of Olympus Pen camera.

As far as we see the digital camera now is the time to presenting with a smaller body; they’ve been working hard under the hood too, and the 12.3 MP sensor has a bit of an upgrade to increase resolution and sharpness with TruePic V image processing, ISO 100-6400 sensitivity, a 3-inch LCD, 20 shooting modes.

More feature is an SDHC slot, and HDMI TV-out for playback of 720p recorded video at 30fps, and the 14-42 lens kit retracts into the barrel when not in use and Olympus’ Supersonic Wave Filter helps keep dust under control when swapping-out the lens for Micro Four Thirds, Four Thirds, or OM lenses.

Facebook was looking at the emerging commerce in vanity URLs as many Facebook users found that their actual names were unavailable by the time they went to register them.

Almost six million members of the popular social networking Web site have registered a custom name since the feature became available late Friday night. Today, there are aprpopximately 200 million members on Facebook, so less than 5% of the total Facebook population has signed up so far.

The next step involves people hoping to profit with the names. For example, on Assetize, a marketplace for Web domains, Twitter and Web accounts, multiple Facebook vanity URLs have gone up on the auction block, including Facebook.com/Nasa, Facebook.com/iPhones and Facebook.com/HPComputers.

Moreover, many Facebookers took a lighter approach to the process and elected to register comical names, such as Facebook.com/AMJgadgets, Facebook.com/Bestdigital and Facebook.com/pagenotfound.

Although the formation of Facebook’s dispute resolution process was a work in progress, the company would look at rescinding a vanity Web address when the registering party does not have legal right to it.

If it is a dispute between two users, then it is first come first serve. But if the user’s name is not actually the vanity URL he registered, the user should not have a right to grab that. Facebook wants it to be associated with user identity and does not want to be completely definitive, but that is the one thing that  Facebook wants to actively encourage.